We are frightened to lean too far into wildness. Get embarrassed. Cause a scandal. Or, like tonight, become Leonard on top of a heifer, ripping it to pieces.

I waited for him on the other side of the electric fence. Afterwards, he held his face in his bloody werewolf hands and sat in the pasture. “You were supposed to be here to stop me!” I tried to comfort him. I told him, “I know some people who are exploring their animal sides in a safe space. You don’t have other people and you don’t have a safe space. I think those are crucial for you to live a happy balanced life as a werewolf.”  

“But I don’t want to be a werewolf at all,” he said. I told him it would be okay.

After he cleaned all the blood off, I drove this big guy to an old home bought by the local LGBT chapter and two leather groups, and there I introduced him to Pup Obedience Training. He was behind a door, so he didn’t shock anyone at first. In the room, about twelve human pups chased a ball, wrestled each other, or sat contentedly at their handler’s side. “These people are just playing like dogs.” No, I told him. They are forgetting that they are human for a moment. A pup is in “pupspace” for hours and they are free to leave behind human worries. He thought that sounded strange when all he wanted to do was be human now. “They explore a headspace so often that they can switch back and forth and control it better. You have to get a ‘wolfspace’ happening when you are human, so that when you are forced to be the wolf, you’re in control.” Think of it like a fire drill, I told him. You practice it enough and during the fire, you don’t have to be controlled by the fire. “Most of these pups just want the mental freedom to be a dog and play when they want to.” He nodded and agreed to try it for a month. “As a rancher, I can’t keep eating my own herd.”  

I encouraged him to meet everyone tonight. Very slowly, we opened the door and he inched into the light. Everyone turned and looked at Leonard, the giant werewolf, and….the pups bounded over to investigate, followed by appreciative handlers. He was surrounded by encouragement and admiration. They probably thought he was a furry in a very expensive fursuit, but you know, no one ran from him. “You’ll need a collar and a harness and a pup name,” I told him. He hugged me. “I’m sorry if I expected you to save me. I’m so needy,” he said. I told him being needy isn’t a bad thing; it lets someone know how to help. “It’s a positive thing?” he asked.  And that’s how a werewolf became a pup named Needy.

Michael was a kid that most people saw and tried not to see at the same time. He was 10, dressed in a purple shirt and khaki shorts, talking exuberantly to anyone who would listen about the waves the boat was making, his electric hope of seeing whales, the colors of the ocean he could name. “Have you seen a whale?” he asked me after designating me a friendly listener. I told him I had. I had seen many whales. I used to work on a ship, I told him, as a merchant marine. I’d seen many deep-sea creatures. “Why are you on the whale-watching tour then—did you miss the ocean?”  I laughed. Yes, I missed the ocean. I told him I was here to see a friend. “I’m here to see a whale,” he said. “Up close. I want to really see him—and I want him to see me.”  I told him I’m sure that any whale who got to be seen by him was a lucky whale, and would be very happy. “I love whales,” he said, “I love a lot of things.” He named off several animals he loved, dramatically, said their names more loudly than folks around us wanted, I could tell, and then he hugged himself, as if he were trying to hug all the animals he loved at once. I said to him, “We’re about to see something much bigger than a whale.” “What’s bigger than a whale?” he laughed. I said, “Leviathan.” LEVIATHAN! WHAT’S THAT?

I looked around at everyone staring at us. I told Michael how the Leviathan spends many years sleeping on the bottom of the ocean, and how the barnacles collect on it because it doesn’t move for so long, and the anemone make their homes on it, and then it stirs, like an earthquake, and moves to another location, taking them all with it.  A man behind us, who had been listening, said, “That’s a demonic creature mentioned in the Bible that will destroy humankind.” He quoted several verses, ‘proving’ the Leviathan was evil. I told Michael that there were many things that people made up stories about. “It’s really sad when people don’t understand the real you,” I told him.

He heard me, and his eyes got wide, searching my face, maybe for recognition. Then, right beneath me in the water, suddenly there was a giant eye. Other people saw it. They were pointing, excited. Michael gasped, and it took him a second to realize what he was seeing. He waved with both hands, jumping up and down. “Oh Mister Leviathan, I see you. I SEE YOU. Do you see ME?”  I teared up next to Michael at how badly he wanted to be seen—by anyone, by anything. Just like my friend here, coming here to be seen, not as something evil, but for what he truly was: Magnificent. I waved at him, “Hello old friend,” I said. He blinked at all of us. Michael waved, shouting “I LOVE YOU WITH ALL MY HEART!” I told Michael, “He heard you. He saw you.”  Then Michael hugged the railing, and then me, and then, finally, himself.

(inspired by a true story told to us by Jason Alspaugh)

I bring the tacos because they can’t go through the drive-thru to get them. We do this ritual every week in the summer. At sunset, when they shed their stony shells and can breathe and move again, I get to the roof of the cathedral (I know the priest) and there they are, waiting! They take the bags from me, kindly, and dive in to unwrap the treasures. From this height you can see so much of the city below, and it is beautiful.  Scarfing down tacos and laughing with your friends on a roof– I wish everyone could do that.

You know, one thing most people don’t know about gargoyles is that they are philosophers—and very spiritual–they spend all this time gazing over the city, thinking about the life beneath them. They say, “Doesn’t everyone watch the life below them?” They come up with radical ideas. “Gargoyles are above the Pope!” “Above all the priests and cardinals!” “If God were in the sky, we would be closer to God, mathematically,” and they laugh. “They would see us first!” (Crunch! go the tacos). 

Sometimes they wonder, in a philosophical way, why there is so little joy in the world. And it makes them sad to see the daytime world, a place they can’t experience, not make people happier. They discuss how we hurt each other, how joy is kept away from us, made restricted, or expensive, or impossible to experience. They sigh and stop eating, becoming still like stone. I hold up a taco. “We do not value the taco enough in this world and the joy it brings!” They holler and hoot and roll over, “You do not!” and stuff more tacos into their mouths, and taco shells, tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, cover their bodies. I believe gargoyles are angels (smeared in taco sauce) watching over us without the capacity to help, and this steals their joy. They are hoping for us, I know, rooting for us, in their silence. On these nights, I stay with them all night in a warm gargoyle cuddle, loving, laughing, telling them stories of people who *do* find joy, while we watch the stars float by and catch the Moon looking down on us from the top of a space cathedral somewhere, smiling at us in all our joy.

After the chaos, the screams, and a hundred prom kids running through purple and pink lights, and after a little persuasion, I convinced the ghosts of the 1913 flood to come down to the floor to talk to me, to us. They descended from the ceiling of my niece’s high school gym through the cardboard stars hanging on fishing line, carrying their own river haze with them, until they all dangled just above the floor. One of the spectral women looked around the gym. “The water was up to the ceiling of the house. We were all asleep. It was so fast. The water.”  One of the kids said that the flood had killed over 900 people in several states. “We were dancing around the barn just the night before.” She looked at the faces of the kids in bright prom dresses and tuxedos. “Like you.” She looked back at me, and the room just stayed quiet for minutes. Kids held each other. No one moved. The ghosts floated in ripples… like they were in water. “It was right here,” she said, moving her hand across us all, as if the gym had been a barn, a field, a house. “I’m so sorry,” I told them. They stared at us. They were waiting for me to tell them what to do now, now that their whole world had ended in a night, a night that they seemed trapped inside forever. I didn’t know what to tell them. I looked at all the faces of the kids, some of them drying their eyes from their own fear. They’d expected to have the best night of their lives. Now they were talking to ghosts—ghosts who had been their age when they died. I didn’t think I would have the right words to comfort her—after so much time, but I tried. I looked at her, “Well, you’re here with us tonight.  Do you want to— do you want to dance with us?  We could all dance with you.” Some of the kids nodded. She stared at me in a hundred years of pain and loss, her face blank. “Yes,” she said, and she drifted down those last few inches, settling like a rock at the bottom of a lake, and her toes touched the dance floor for the first time.